This book provides an integrated treatment of blockmodeling, the most frequently used technique in social network analysis. It secures its mathematical foundations and then generalizes blockmodeling for the analysis of many types of network structures. Examples are used throughout the text and include small group structures, little league baseball teams, intra-organizational networks, inter-organizational networks, baboon grooming networks, marriage ties of noble families, trust networks, signed networks, Supreme Court decisions, journal citation networks, and alliance networks. Also provided is an integrated treatment of algebraic and graph theoretic concepts for network analysis and a broad introduction to cluster analysis. These formal ideas are the foundations for the authors' proposal for direct optimizational approaches to blockmodeling which yield blockmodels that best fit the data, a measure of fit that is integral to the establishment of blockmodels, and creates the potential for many generalizations and a deductive use of blockmodeling.
· 2009
The Latin language has been the one constant in the cultural history of the West for more than two millennia. It has been the foundation of our education, and has defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith, and our knowledge of how the world functions. Indeed, the language has proved far more enduring than its empire in Rome, its use echoing on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of modern science, and until forty years ago, in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. It is the unseen substance that makes us members of the Western world. In his erudite and entertaining "biography," Nicholas Ostler shows how and why (against the odds, through conquest from within and without) Latin survived and thrived even as its creators and other languages failed. Originally the dialect of Rome and its surrounds, Latin supplanted its neighbors to become, by conquest and settlement, the language of all Italy, and then of Western Europe and North Africa. Its cultural creep toward Greek in the East led it to copy and then ally with it in an unprecedented, but invincible combination: Greek theory and Roman practice, delivered through Latin, became the foundation of Western civilization. Christianity, a latecomer, then joined the alliance, and became vital to Latin's survival when the empire collapsed. Spoken Latin re-emerged as a host of new languages, from Portuguese and Spanish in the west to Romanian in the east. But a knowledge of Latin lived on as the common code of European thought, and inspired the founders of Europe's New World in the Americas. E pluribus unum. Illuminating the extravaganza of its past, Nicholas Ostler makes clear that, in a thousand echoes, Latin lives on, ad infinitum.
· 2021
Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat. Now fully updated with an introduction examining the systemic issues exposed by Brexit and Covid-19, The Corruption of Capitalism argues that rentier capitalism is fostering revolt and presents a new income distribution system that would achieve the extinction of the rentier while encouraging sustainable growth.
China has become the world's largest English learning society, and China's decisions in relation to English will directly affect its fortunes into the future. This unique volume explores the prospects of English in relation to the debates on identity and cultural values that mass English teaching in China have stimulated.
One of the most fascinating problems in Behavioural Neurology is the question of the cerebral organization for language during childhood. Acquired aphasia in children, albeit rare, is a unique circumstance in which to study the relations between language and the brain during cerebral maturation. Its study further contributes to our understanding of the recovery processes and brain plasticity during childhood. But while there is a great amount of information and experimental work on brain-behaviour relationships in adult subjects, the literature about the effects of focal brain lesions in children is both exiguous and scattered throughout scientific journals and books. We felt it was time to organize a meeting where scientists in this field could compare their experiences and discuss ideas coming from different areas of research. A workshop on Acquired Aphasia in Children was held in Sintra, Portugal, on September 13-15, 1990, and attended by 44 participants from 13 differents countries. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal and the group was kept small to achieve this effect. It was a very lively and pleasant meeting. Some consensus was indeed arrived at concerning methodological problems, definition of terms, and guidelines for future research. The main contributions are collected in this book which, we hope, will serve the scientific community as a reference work on Childhood Aphasia. I,P.M., AC.C.
"Social competition and Law, University of Antwerp"--Cover.
A comparative study of the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages produced by the Council of Europe in 2001, this book asks writers in European countries and countries in the Americas and Asia to explain the influence of the CEFR. For each country there is a policy-maker and an academic perspective.
Understanding Motor Development, a worldwide best-selling text, provides students with both an explanatory and a descriptive basis for the processes and products of motor development. Covering the entire life span, this text focuses on the phases of motor development and provides a solid introduction to the biological, affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects within each developmental stage. The student is presented with the most up-to-date research and theory, while the Triangulated Hourglass Model is used as a consistent conceptual framework that brings clarity to understanding infant, childhood, adolescent, and adult motor development.
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